Solid-state drives: No rush to widespread success

Will 2009 be the year that solid-state drives take off? Maybe not. The speedy drives are catching on, but wider acceptance will take time--and the bad economy isn't helping.

Costs are still high for these drives, which typically outdo--and in some cases blow away--hard disks in performance. "2010-2011...that's when we think the price points for the SSD market get attractive enough to really drive stronger growth," Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer of SanDisk, said this week during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call.

Samsung is the leading supplier of solid-state drives.

(Credit: Samsung)

Indeed, there is still a wide price gap between hard-disk drives and solid-state drives. The difference, for example, between a 120GB hard-disk drive and 128GB solid-state drive--essentially the same capacity--on the new Apple MacBooks is $500. That's a deal-breaker for a lot of consumers. (On a Dell XPS M1530 notebook, the difference in price between a 250GB 5400rpm hard disk drive and a "Ultra Performance" 128GB solid-state drive is also $500.)

"On the mainstream notebook side we agree with SanDisk that the price points are too high and the added benefits received by customers from SSDs are just not worth the added expense," said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities. "We expect the transition in notebooks to take a long time and will probably require Microsoft to change the OS in order to jumpstart this transition," Cohen said, citing the need for Microsoft to make Windows Vista and Windows 7 more SSD-friendly.

Eli Harari, chairman and CEO of SanDisk, believes that solid-state drives will have to wait a little longer yet for their breakthrough.

"It's still a very young market, and 2009 is not the year that it really takes off," he said during SanDisk's earnings call. In addition, solid-state drive demand will not be enough to siphon off the flash memory oversupply that is plaguing the flash memory industry, he said. "I don't believe...that 2009 inventory overhang is going to be solved through solid-state disks."

Nor does Intel--which just started shipping its first high-capacity solid-state drives this fall--see the market really taking off for a couple of years in laptops.

"I believe within in two years when the economies of scale come into play and the prices hit the right point, it will not only be in the more expensive systems but go down to mainstream (laptops)," Mooley Eden, Intel's general manager of mobile platforms, said in Taipei on Tuesday. Intel is shipping 80GB drives now and will ship a 160GB solid-state drive later this quarter.

Seagate, the largest hard-disk drive supplier, plans to enter the market in 2009 but sees "price as an inhibitor right now," according to Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company. He also says standards work needs to get completed to make enterprise customers comfortable and "overcome endurance fears."

Beyond that, enterprise customers are showing resistance to accelerated adoption of solid-state drives as the economy worsens. "Conditions across technology are awful," said Avian Securities' Cohen. "On the enterprise SSD side, where we thought it made the most sense for the transition to occur...we have seen a slowdown in momentum for this shift as CTOs and CFOs look to conserve cash and slow new adoption programs."

[kwhsy82]

Here's the thing slowing down me: Try finding Windows-based machines with these drives. The 24-hour HP machine is still vaporware (I'm on their email list to be notified). Last I looked, the biggest SSDs on Dell were 80 gig. And older SSDs. Yes, I'm sure there are some vendors with them. But last I checked, HP and Dell are pretty significant vendors and their current offerings with SSDs are paltry.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Toshiba R500.
Lenovo X300.

Those two are machines I have here on the test bench that have SSD's in them. I expect you can find them in a lot of models if you look for the options.

[Crunchy Doodle]

I upgraded my ASUS C90S with an OCZ V2 60GB SSD a month or so ago when they were on special for $220. I loaded up Vista Ultimate SP1, an office suite, a virus scanner and some photograph and video editing and production tools. The performance is great. It's way faster and smoother than it was with the same basic software load and a tradition 7200RPM hard drive. The battery life is a bit better, and of course, it's silent and runs a little cooler. I was after raw performance and willing to pay a few bucks for it. I got what I wanted.

[Seaspray0]

What I'm interested in is the reliability factor. Flash memory was not known for reliability when it came out. How does the reliability of a flash hard drive compare to the traditional platter? I'm still looking for that answer.

[pretenderkc]

flash memory might have problem with compatibility when it first came out.
example, if you use a different card reader for the flash memory, this might cause some problem due to poor firmware.

in term of reliability, both flash memory and the platter counterpart are the same except flash memory is not vulnerable to gravity, jolt or vibration....that's the benefit of SSD.

[David Turner]

You might want to have a look at this http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit
It is a user whom did some maths around the write limit of his Eee PC's SSD

[Mr. Dee]

2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, I don't care, I just don't see the value of an SSD over a mechanical hard disk, especially where the price per giga byte is concerned. The average, hard disk for a laptop in 2010 will hit 700 GBs to 1 TB in 2010. Why would I really invest in a overly expensive product for $400, when I could get a 1 TB laptop for the same price ratio? It just does not add for the consumer right now, at least the average consumer. I thought Vista already had out of the box support for SSDs with its Ready Drive Technology. Well, with this revelation that it might not, its even more reason not to invest in SSDs. I see support for it on the desktop side even worst when 5 TB HDs hit the market in 2010.

[Originalme8]

SSD's are for pure performance. They are for people who are concerned with performance and reliability. I wouldn't mind spending a little extra cash to get higher performance. It's just like upgrading your processor or video card in my opinion and I cannot wait for the technology to hit the main stream market!

[pretenderkc]

theoretically, you don't use your main drive for data storage. you would use the main drive for operating system and application softwares. thus, 120 GB drive for os and apps are plenty. most laptop now has USB or flash memory reader. you would use that for data storage. for those who only owned one computer (i.e., laptop), then, the external USB is the cheap way to go for data storage.

SSD provides better performance and reliabality than the platter counterpart.
because laptop is for mobile solution and people might jolt or drop the laptop, SSD is the answer.
also, some people now use laptop in their car for GPS navigation system, it's another good reason why SSD is a better solution than platter due to car vibration or hitting a speed bump.

[The_Decider]

Take the performance benefit and analyze that with the cost. The performance/cost ratio is still pretty low. Especially if you have enough memory where you don't need to access the disk all that often.

Have they fixed the issue of limited number of writes yet? That is a deal killer.